New York is challenging but it’s cuz I’m sensitive. I take the subway and guard my emotions, keeping a stone face inside the frenzy below the platform steps. This month, I’ve seen a man light up a crack pipe at Eastern Parkway, the Brooklyn Museum stop. He was mumbling about the Jews. A younger Latino man without a winter coat yelled to himself on the train I caught the following day. I couldn’t make out what he was saying so I stayed on the other corner of the car. These moments stop any mindfulness attempts I’m trying on this or that app.

You try box-breathing on a four count when an elderly/teenaged junkie is screaming through her remaining teeth to get off her and you’re on the opposite side of the car. In your head, you’re on the opposite side of the world. Flipping through TikTokss in Sudan, checking IG Stories in Oakland, mainlining rage until the screaming, desperate woman in front of you forces an actual fear response. You get off at 125th Street because it’s your stop.

The Superbowl is an ad break from the ongoing project of imperial expansion and collapse. There is the Mario Bowl, which mimics the game using Nintendo IP and animation. There’s the Puppy Bowl, where some natural pet food vendor sponsors anonymous canines flopping to the 20-yard line before any of the pack pisses or shits themselves. Wasn’t there a Hooters Bowl at some point or have I imagined a reality still more troubling than our own?

There’s simulcasting, where microinfluencers narrate the game to their hyper-niche audiences, framing its events much like all of our information, in digestible, agreeable “snacks” to be consumed like the fat-infusing, sugar-soaked pieces they are. If you do not know what a microinfluencer is, don’t worry. All of us are one, and companies have forced a reality where we label and monetize our personal connections and ideas so we’re reduced to avatars with a floating dollar amount overhead. We’re Grand Theft Auto. We’re SIMs. We’re the non-player characters that the Digital God Complex dreamed of when money finally hit the internet. We used to call it cyberspace. Now, it’s just “the timeline.”

I took the commuter rail to my mother’s house for the big show. I know very little about the Superbowl since tuning out from the NFL, figuring they had enough fans of their concussion horrorcore to do fine without me. Still, the Brooklynite in me perks up when there are New York connections to the spectacle, like Jay-Z’s shepherding of the game’s main event. Or like a proud product of Nuyorican cultural callaloo taking the stage during our harshest nativism era. Bad Bunny presents a problem, our main problem.

In eighth grade, my English teacher went on a tirade about the melting pot.

“If you’re Black in this country, America ain’t no melting pot. At least not voluntarily. At best, it’s a salad bowl,” he said. This was during the height of multi-culti, where a kid like me could go full rags-to-riches at a prep school because white liberal guilt hit the jackpot line of my exact tuition. He understood that the pieces don’t melt together and that they all rot once one does.

I was trying to explain this to my family, who wasn’t too familiar with Bad Bunny.

“He’s like the early dancehall artists mixed with the salsa artists mixed with the hip-hop flows of reggaeton. But he’s also not about all this fuck shit the U.S. is doing, deporting innocent people,” and I offered this last point softly. I planted the seed of his trustworthiness because our family space can look sideways at other groups who don’t claim “Black” on the whole. Benito ain’t like that.

Which makes him a thorny problem for this moment. As the president railed against the halftime act for the second year in a row, the public watched a crowning moment for Bad Bunny, a clear winner of culture wars. He avoided touring the U.S., so as not to put fans at risk during the Reichstag sweeps for ethnic cleansing. He’s spoken up for Puerto Rican sovereignty. He’s celebrated Blackness and racial justice in his music. And he’s still the biggest artist in the world. The state war is raging but the downtrodden — the global majority — are winning the culture war by light years.

His performance was the ad break from genocide. The Skip Intro button before a downfall. The PR beacon gave us an inspiring thirteen minutes during the AI commerce blitz, where chat bots assure us they’re not capable of murder, or anything except shopping really. A dovish MC to divert our gaze from the killing fields. I loved that Bad Bunny used sugar cane in his set because so many of our ancestors felt the prickly stalks of the plant when it was the only way up. I also grimaced as the performance ended, leaving the symbols to evaporate in red, white, and blue gun flare.

Whereas usually we’re subject to our own timeline, custom ads playing for our weight loss, our depression, our programming, the Superbowl subjected us to the shared contradiction. The stars make millions and culture titillates while the concentration camp packs kids away. Tech companies buy up nine-figure ad slots and decimate jobs on the promise there’s no way any of us will be employable if you let them tell it. The president hates the music we love. The ones dancing and gyrating and trying to make a buck are the losers. I told my family that a kid in Latin America would see Bad Bunny like global hoop phenoms saw the Dream Team.

Inside, I feel like we might not be lucky enough to see a world where that kid survives the massive implosion we’re setting up right now. I’ma still dance.